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Why is this on WordPress?

You may have noticed that this is a WordPress blog. Both the D7UX and the Disambiguity blogs run WordPress. Mark Boulton Design uses Expression Engine. Since we first started working with Drupal there have been questions (and the occasional shout of #fail) that we continue to use these platforms and haven’t switched to Drupal.

Don’t we know Drupal can do all that WordPress can do and more?! Don’t we love Drupal?!

Well, yes and yes. We know Drupal is amazing and we love it (well, more to the point, we love the people all around Drupal), but unfortunately, for the time being, it is too broken for us to be able to do the work we need to do on this project at the pace that we need to do it. We don’t have time to ‘learn’ Drupal, nor the skills to bend it to our will (and make it look acceptably pretty), we can’t even get a blog post on the homepage (as you’ll see in the videos that follow the installation video about which I’ll post as soon as they finally make it up to YouTube).

We appreciate all the offers of porting this blog over to Drupal, but to be honest, I really like using WordPress and nothing I’ve seen of Drupal makes me want to switch over at the moment.

See, I love the *idea* of Drupal, but the sooner we all agree that from a User Experience perspective it is horribly broken and concentrate on FIXING that, the better it will be. Admitting this doesn’t make us Drupal Haters, far from it. It just makes us honest and informed. After all, we use a whole raft of tools to make and administer websites all the time – we actually have a pretty good perspective to be making this call.

If we didn’t *really* care about making Drupal amazing, we wouldn’t start difficult conversations like these ones. And there is a big reason why one of the key success criteria for this project is that once this project is done Mark & I will *want* to switch from WordPress and Expression Engine to Drupal.

And what of ‘eating our own dogfood?’ – well, again, back to that success criteria of Mark & I using Drupal once the new UX is implemented. If we’re not using Drupal then, I’m happy to be called on this. For now, the fact that we are NOT entrenched Drupal users is actually a great advantage to us, rather than a disadvantage. It gives us perspective, distance from the project that allows us to see things differently, to challenge accepted ideas and approaches, to re-hash conversations that have been had a thousand times already and have them a little differently. It helps us not see that things might be impossible (and, at this stage of the project, that’s a good thing).

We’re not entirely ignorant of Drupal, not at all. And becoming less so every day. And we are surrounded by an incredibly informed and amazingly helpful community who give us *way* more help coming to terms with Drupal than the average ‘newcomer’ would have.

We know that Drupal is not WordPress, and we have no intention of making it so, but using WordPress helps us get our work done faster and easier for the time being, and it helps us maintain perspective and distance – and for now those things are really important to us.

But if, this time next year, this blog isn’t running on Drupal and if it doesn’t look amazing – then please come and shout #fail as loudly as you can. Because then you’ll be completely right, we will have failed.

Let’s not do that. Let’s make Drupal amazing.

And thanks so much to everyone who has come on board and started to help shape D7UX by responding to our initial Experience Strategy, Audience Matrix and Personality Quiz. The feedback has been incredible and insightful. We’ll have more for you to look at soon!

I absolutely agree with what you are saying about maintaining some distance. There’s a load of esprit de corps in the Drupal community, as it well should have, but that “our thing is better than that thing” mentality undermines genuine attempts at conversation towards making Drupal absolutely stellar. I think the majority of the members of the Drupal community, myself included, choose the most practical tool for the job in their toolbox in their daily work lives and this makes complete practical sense to me, your approach. In the end, with the UX work, hopefully Drupal will be the logical go-to solution for people in the not-too-distant future, as WordPress is for hundreds of thousands of people around the world currently. I’m rooting for ya!

Totally agree with everything you’ve said in this blog post, but the video seems a bit unfair – you seem like front end web developers trying to work on the back end! You’d be better off with a hosted solution like bryght[1]!

Surely everyone that’s ever uploaded web site files to a server has a basic idea of file permissions? Not that the installation couldn’t do with a bit of rewording. And I appreciate you’re attempting to look at this with fresh eyes, but that just seemed a bit unfair.

Hear, hear! I totally support and understand your choice. To answer commenter adrinux, it’s our job as usability professionals to make the right way appear to be the easiest way. It’s not necessary to define obstacles such as “must know unix file permissions” as prerequisites – instead, find a way to describe the requirement in user language at the time of need. Looking forward to helping with this!

I realize all this should be much simpler, and that doing many things in Drupal is counter intuitive.

But, to be fair, in the video where you attempt to publish a post, you both spend time reading the content type descriptions but apparently miss the part that says “By default, an article entry is automatically featured on the site’s initial home page… .”

Then, it appears that you mentally mapped article and blog into WordPress equivalents, and wound up picking the wrong one (if you wanted your post to appear on the front page easily).

I’m not sure what this says — I guess, it means that:

– people don’t really read the help text, and/or the help text needs to be more clear and direct.
– people automatically map new things into patterns with which they are already familiar.
– the ‘disappearing content’ problem is a significant issue.

I certainly understand and appreciate your desire to approach Drupal’s usability problems with perspective, from a distance. And, there’s much in WordPress that we should aspire to emulate — it’s a good package.

I hope, though, that you’ll try to maintain perspective and distance from the WordPress solution as well. Drupal is a unique package, and needs and deserves its own unique solutions.

@ Lynda
Sorry, I was largely joking about “must know unix file permissions”, I don’t think that came across =D

And yes, the language (and documentation) needs improving, yes better UX will make it *easier*. My point was that there’s a technical issue here, the file permissions need to be altered and making that ‘easy’ by say getting drupal/wordpress to do it tends to create security issues.

Unless we can solve the technical problem no amount of UX will make it *easy* just easier and maybe a bit less scary.

The process Leisa and Mark went through was actually artificial, they say in the video that someone put drupal onto the server for them and set up the database, in most real world cases anyone capable of doing that will have little or no problem dealing with a supposedly scary/confusing message about file permissions 🙂

Not that it wasn’t valid or useful for Mark and Leisa to run through the install, it clearly was! I just think their comments about the file permissions were a bit OTT. =D

“But if, this time next year, this blog isn’t running on Drupal and if it doesn’t look amazing – then please come and shout #fail as loudly as you can. Because then you’ll be completely right, we will have failed.”

If this is where you’re heading, then, with all due respect, we’re f**ked.

Unless you intend to ship a blog distribution with core. And ship a ton of supporting modules with core.

The blog module that ships with Drupal enables multi-user, community blogging functionality out of the box (OOB). It needs more explanation and maybe re-naming — like “multi-blog”. But, up until now, Drupal OOB has not been targeted at being a great blog.

Please examine the concept of installation profiles. Again, Drupal out of the box can be WHATEVER we want it to be … and we need to decide what direction to aim it.

Note: I have no problem at all with you running this on WP — use whatever tools you want for communication, which are usually going to be the tools you are more familiar / comfortable with. With that in mind, can you please enable “subscribe to comments via email” functionality?

For me, the file permissions thing – and our reactions to them, however OTT – are a symptom of assuming a base-level of understanding on the part of drupal. Now, it could be that this sort of thing could be tailored by various install profiles. Or, maybe those error messages are written in such a way that the world might not end if you don’t do something about it.

As someone who has been “using” Drupal for about two years or so, but who isn’t entrenched in the Drupal community much (yet), I can say that I’m extremely excited about the work you’re doing. I work with a backend developer who “gets it,” and after two years I think I’m beginning to “get it,” to a degree … And yet when I think of the hours spent frustrated during install and config, etc., let alone the conversations when trying to teach clients to actually use the admin interface (even in limited fashion). Lord!

It’s extremely important that Drupal become more understandable to the Admin level user. This is exciting work you’re doing, and necessary to make Drupal better. Be patient and keep up the good work!

I enjoyed the videos, and I had never thought about the way “default home page” (setting) and the features of menu.module could be mixed up. The assumption I see is that the site home page is at the root of a navigation hierarchy, and this navigation hierarchy is built through menu module. Great work!

Being new to Drupal myself I wanted the same simple integration of images and text that you get right away in WordPress. But it seems to be a bit complicated – please correct me if I’m wrong!
Great to follow your work!

I second what Keith said above: “I hope, though, that you’ll try to maintain perspective and distance from the WordPress solution as well. Drupal is a unique package, and needs and deserves its own unique solutions”.

One example of insufficient distancing from WordPress is in the installation video where Leisa says she is not interested in visiting the admin section to set up and configure the site but just wants to enter content. I believe it’s an apples to oranges comparison here – Drupal is not a mere blogging platform but a far more powerful CMS. Just because one can simply post content in WordPress after installation doesn’t mean it has to work the same way in drupal.

Perhaps what is really needed is for the UI to tell a new user (and guide them?) they need to do set up a few things before they can post content.

One strange experience posting this – I kept looking for a submit button and even refreshed the page before I realized the submit comment button spanned the entire width of the comment form. I wonder if that’s good UI from WordPress. May be a quirk with this particular theme.

I agree with Boris. I think we need to be really careful with comparisons to WordPress. Drupal is not a direct competitor to WordPress nor should it be. I actually don’t consider it a competitor to Joomla either for that matter, though the case there could be made far better than for WordPress. For me, Drupal should be compared to Django or even RoR for that matter.

If a blog is all someone needs then they should use WordPress and not Drupal. However, if someone needs a full featured Web2.0 site/application along with a blog, then Drupal is THE answer.

In other words, defining the success of this effort at whether or not Leisa and/or Mark would choose Drupal as their blogging platform is horribly misguided.

If we aim this effort at trying to make Drupal THE choice for bloggers we will be failing miserably and doing a huge disservice to the community.

That said, there still a huge amount of usability improvements to be made– no question. Anything we can poach from WordPress, Joomla, MovableType, Mediawiki, whatever is great. Lets just not focus on wordpress as some sort of gold standard for what Drupal should be.

It’s not that WordPress is the gold standard of what Drupal should be, but WP has set a very high standard of usability, which is what Drupal needs to learn from. This project is saying Drupal can be super flexible *and* usable. No one wants Drupal to be just a blogging platform.

Also @WorldFallz, if we are compare Drupal to frameworks like RoR, then we have a long way to go IMO.

Having used both Drupal and WordPress over the past few years I’ve gotten used to the idiosyncrasies of both. I’m glad that this effort is going on and I look forward to using a Drupal CMS that is relatively as “friendly” to use as WordPress, particularly in regards to customizing themes.

Totally agree with you guys’ reactions during the install, that large error message is alarming and jarring.

Great to see that you gave some praise where it’s due as well. The installer with the progress bar is rather good. 🙂

The problem with that error message is that it’s competing for attention with the form below it. Perhaps an extra — impossible to get past until you’ve set the permissions to something safe — step could be added to the installer?

Im totally agree with people that said that Drupal is out of the box and very very flexible where you can do out of the range of its default. I’m using Drupal just only for 3 month but I have manage to do something quite high level of web developing. Since to get Drupal easier to be used as the WordPress is the big issue cause mostly of the people when come across for the first time using CMS, they want it look as nice, looking good and professional site.

But they didn’t explorer it by themselves first. All they wanna is it all prepared by the system. That is a very different range when you wanna to make it very usable, complex and great site and really easy to make it. If this can be done, all the company in this world that provide a web development services will going down and close up.

So, i think to make it management of content, usability of system and flexibility easier is correct but to make the system as the perfect once, it must be not. Leave the theming for the designer out there and Drupal team as an architectural programming designer.

“For me, the file permissions thing – and our reactions to them, however OTT – are a symptom of assuming a base-level of understanding on the part of drupal. Now, it could be that this sort of thing could be tailored by various install profiles. Or, maybe those error messages are written in such a way that the world might not end if you don’t do something about it.”

You would never have got to the web based installer if you couldn’t modify the file permissions for the settings.php. All this video does is highlight how incompetent you two actually are when it comes to anything beyond design. If you are installing a CMS on a server you have at least a basic knowledge of how to do these things, or the ability to learn.

This is not UX testing, it is two idiots staring at a screen and comparing Drupal to WordPress. Please take this more seriously.

It was April 1 here (downunder) when I first read this blog posting and video, so at first I thought it must have been an April Fool’s day joke. . .

Tell me it’s not true that you’ve only just installed Drupal for the first time? And are you really sure you want to go with this argument for using WordPress instead of Drupal? Taking that argument to the extreme, all Windows users should love Vista because they don’t have a “healthy distance” from the OS!

Seriously, it’s good that Mark and Leisa aren’t Drupal fanboys (or girl) and have experience with other platforms. But now that you have a job to do with Drupal’s UX, shouldn’t you be building as many Drupal sites as possible, to really to get to know its good points, bad points and idiosyncracies? Usability testing and listening to the Drupal community is great, but there’s nothing like real-world experience. In particular, getting feedback from real-life clients/end users would be a huge benefit to you.

“The useability of Drupal is broken” . . . well, most of us agree it needs significant improvement, but as a part-time developer still on the Drupal learning curve, I think that sweeping statement is a gross exaggeration. Too much is made of small usability problems like “where did my page go?” In that case, it just needs to be made a bit more obvious that you can add the page to a menu as you create it. The difficulty of Drupal theming is exaggerated too. With D6, all you need is decent CSS knowledge, a good starter theme and a willingness to learn. If a PHP-challenged user like me can learn it, anyone can.

I was initially excited that a designer with Mark credentials was heading up a concerted move to improve Drupal’s usability, but to be honest, I’m a little worried now. It’s not so much Drupal being turned into WordPress that worries me (but tell me it’s not, is it?), the greater potential danger is over-thinking or over-theorizing the UX if it’s done by people too far removed from Drupal.

The last thing we want is a CMS/CMF that tries to be everything to everyone, but doesn’t really excel at anything. In my view, Drupal should concentrate on being a lean, fast CMF but with usability improvements. That doesn’t mean making it for experienced coders only (because I’m certainly not). For what it’s worth, here’s my four-point plan:

1. Keep the core lean but as flexible as possible, with as many helper modules/frameworks as possible (cck, views, pathauto, date, filefield, imagefield, etc), rather than specific apps (eg blog, forum, etc) which would become contributed modules. The aim: to be able build a broad range of sites without coding (except for customising the theme’s CSS, of course).

2. The top priority for usability should be the end-user experience. This needs significant, but relatively straightfoward improvements, such as good WYSIWYG editor, image-handling, and better content- and user-management in the core.

3. For site builders, most of the usability problems could be fixed with some subtle solutions, rather than a complete makeover. To start with, it shouldn’t be difficult to add a wizard that creates the basic site framework (ie, menus with options for taxonomy and node types) which would be a real help to site builders of all levels. (However, apart from this wizard, I wouldn’t want to see too much Ajaxy/popup stuff in the backend. I’d rather see usability problems solved with old-fashioned good design.)

3. As pretty much everyone agrees, a good, well-documented starter theme in the core is a no-brainer (as well as some of more modern finished themes available now).

Of course, it also wouldn’t hurt to use friendlier terminology. But some Drupal concepts are going always to be more difficult for new site builders to grasp, such as creating new node types and all the taxonomy options. Perhaps delf’s suggestion (http://drupal.org/node/418560#comment-1424084) on adding installation profiles might help to some extent in the longer term, but perhaps we might just have to accept some learning curve as the price of Drupal’s incredible flexibility.

I agree with Boris as to the tone of the tagline. There’s a bit of “fuck you, impress me” snarkiness that comes across, and I’m not sure that’s what you intend, or what is going to attract more engaged participation. Some people will rise to the bait and take it as a challenge, but more of us respond to sharing the love of Drupal. When I saw the header, I was immediately put off, and if I hadn’t worked with you both already and knew where you were coming from, I likely would have moved on. How many have moved on already?

Shouldn’t we be more worried about comparing Drupal to the likes of Joomla.

I know a lot of SMEs around my area are encouraged to use Joomla. I wonder if its due to the wysiwyg editor. Or ease of use?

At the moment I see Drupal as something that needs a lot of work from the developer before the client can use it. What we should be moving towards is something the business could implement themselves. With additional functionality, custom themes etc as things that need more advanced help.

You would never have got to the web based installer if you couldn’t modify the file permissions for the settings.php. All this video does is highlight how incompetent you two actually are when it comes to anything beyond design. If you are installing a CMS on a server you have at least a basic knowledge of how to do these things, or the ability to learn.

Firstly, I believe this was a hosted copy of Drupal, they just started with the installation screen.

Secondly, yes they’re designers, the point they’re making is that Drupal should be easy enough for them to install.

The instructions and installation process should be easy enough to follow, for anyone, without being jarring. Pointing out bad things about the installation process does not make them incompetent, it means they have a good idea of usability.

This is not UX testing, it is two idiots staring at a screen and comparing Drupal to WordPress. Please take this more seriously.

I’ve been offline in a workshop all day, and have only a few minutes to respond, so here are some initial thoughts on the feedback so far. I’ll get back with some more specific responses soon.

who are the 80%

who are the 80% of people we refer to? yes, some of them are people who want to make blogs, but the vast majority are your clients, or your coworkers – they’re the content team at MTV who have to publish the latest news on Michael Jackson, they’re the marketing team at Sony BMG who have to make a website for the next big rock star, they’re Obama’s team at the Whitehouse keeping us all up to date on Recovery.gov… it’s a whole bunch of smart people for whom interacting with Drupal is a part of their every day work.

at the moment, a lot of people are doing a lot of work customising interfaces to make them usable, running hour after hour of training so that people can ‘learn’ Drupal to just publish some content online, fielding support calls throughout the day… spending hours that could be spent making Drupal even more powerful.

these 80% are not dumb, but they’re not Drupal developers and neither should be. Chances are they’ve seen a bunch of different content management systems. they should be able to use Drupal without being made to feel dumb.

simple != dumbing down

there is absolutely no relationship between making Drupal easier for these people to use and making Drupal less powerful or less sophisticated. we respect the importance of the Developer Experience (DX) – but you guys are here to talk about your experience and what needs fixing. We’re here to represent those who aren’t here in the community but who are a big part of the reason we, the Drupal community, *are* here.

wordpress, schmwordpress

yes, we are using WordPress as a tool to communicate in this project. As @webchick pointed out, we’re using a bunch of different tools. I don’t know what the fixation on WordPress is and why there is an assumption that we would use it as a model for Drupal. Yes, WordPress has pretty nice UX. But is is just one of many content management systems that Mark & I have been exposed to as users and designers of dozens of different content management systems, both open source and commercial and custom built, over the past decade or so. We’ll be drawing on ALL of that, as well as our developing Drupal knowledge and, with your assistance, the vast resource that is the Drupal community as we move forward on this project.

we’re listening

we’ve had some tough things to listen to today, but we’re listening. we’re working hard to make sure that as many people know about this project as possible so that you can shape it. this *is* a big opportunity – please continue to engage with us and lets work productively to get to the best possible outcome – a Drupal that continues to be incredibly powerful, but that also gives good UX to the people who take what we make and continue to grow it through creating and managing content and communities.

more soon!

x-posted at drupal.org and elsewhere on this site, apologies for dupes.

I find it funny that the folks who will be redoing Drupal’s UX stuff picked one of the plainest WordPress themes they could find. As a WP user thinking about switching back to Drupes, I’m not sure this post helps things. But you are correct Drupes is way too complex and that simple things like image uploading and wyswig editing should be there out of the box. I shouldn’t have to hunt, peck, and search a bunch of forums just for something as simple as uploading and adding an image. Not only that the the process of installing said Image modules is a nightmare, I still haven’t been able to get it to run properly on my test site and like you, I’m planning on launching several new projects I’d like to do them on Drupal but I don’t have time or patience to have it fight me every step of the way. With that said, while WordPress is the Gold Standard in Usability some of their recent moves is breaking it. Using pop ups for the Media uploads for instance doesn’t work well in Safari or Firefox and is buggy. All I want to be able to do is post a story, add images – inline and be able to resize those images. You can’t do this in Drupal.

You really did not make it clear why you are using WP. Its your personal preferance, you are used to it. Thats ok dude.
But here you are having some discussions.
Which are just a bunch of new posts and replies to this post.
You could have done this in groups.drupal.org. This does not need you to learn anything. I cannot make head or tail out of your explanation. If somebody can, please explain.

Aschi – the reason we are having the discussions out here rather than just at groups.drupal.org is because there are a lot of people who are not members of Drupal.org or Groups, and who don’t even identify as current Drupal users who are really important contributors to these discussions. If we were to host this discussion only on Drupal.org then we would miss out on their input. If you take a look through the feedback we’re getting I think you can see that there is a real mix of contributors which is v pleasing.

I love the idea of drupal too. I tried making a website using it, back about a year ago…and I was like “How on earth am I going to convince a client to go through all this just to make 1 blog entry or page?” …it just isn’t practical. So, I’m excited about what you’re doin’ here. I’ll be keepin’ track of Drupal 7’s development.

Hi Leisa, Thanks so much.
Feel free to carry on. However I feel very less users or very few people know about d7ux, there are many more people at groups.drupal.org
Groups.drupal is also visited by many new folks who are visiting their for the first time. So to serve your purpose even better groups can be a good place.

You can argue all you want that this should have been in Drupal, but personally I likely wouldn’t be following it if it was. I like Drupal and I design for it, but Drupal Groups is a confusing mess to me. To me it looks like too much information dumped on a page in apparently random order.

Several commenters have used the word “elitist” to criticize this blog, yet are refusing to listen to the discussion because it isn’t taking place in Drupal. Who’s elitist? Don’t throw out the conversation because you don’t like the venue.

I definitely understand the need for a certain level of objectivity and impartiality when it comes to improving Drupal – and I agree: Objectivity is critical.

However … I feel like I’m being hosed by these two.

Which is to say, I agree with ADRINUX’s observation that the video ‘was actually artificial’ – a staged demonstration of faux-incompetence.

(I am reminded of those infomercials where they show someone splashing paint all over the place or hacking-away at a pan of brownies like a lumberjack with a spatula while the narrator’s voice-over asks: “Tired of this?”)

WHY:

My reaction is precipitated by the fact that the whole D7UX-blog under-Wordpress thing is HIGHLY suspect… and begs several important questions:

– If you aren’t Drupal users (entrenched or otherwise), why are you even bothering to invest time/energy into this?

– If you have a genuine/committed interest in contributing to the Drupal community, why wouldn’t you demonstrate that commitment/genuine-interest by actually USING the platform in question for the subject-matter at hand? (the usability thing seems like a pretty weak excuse)

– If you seriously cannot even figure out how to post a simple blog-entry in Drupal, you are beyond help. Drupal is a full-fledged blogging engine right-out-of-the-box and always has been. What seems to br the problem?

– If you don’t even use Drupal in any real-world settings and are (evidently) not even capable of setting it up with even the most BASIC features … What business do you have making any suggestions on how to go about ‘improving’ it? I’m all for objectivity, but complete ignorance? What really qualifies you to have an opinion, much less offer us suggestions?

… I’m sure I can think of more questions but these oughta do it for now.

Personally, I find Drupal very easy to use and I don’t have any major issues with the user-interface. I don’t think it’s broken and therefore I don’t think it needs fixin’.

Come to think of it, I can’t really imagine how Drupal’s UI could be much simpler or straight-forward than it already is.

Niggardly Treatment is right: “the whole, we can’t use Drupal for our blog excuse is lame.”

This whole website seems LESS like an objective, impartial analysis of how to improve Drupal and MORE like a poorly-executed, pseudo-polemic/propaganda hit-job, designed to drum-up WordPress users and/or discredit Drupal in a very back-handed, reverse-social-engineering sort of way.

Methinks Leisa & Mark have some kind of vested interest in WordPress (financial or otherwise).

Whether or not this comment gets past moderation will answer that question for me once and for all.

@conan – we have Akismet running on the site for spam, however we don’t censor comments, which I think is what you’re referring to here. (Having said that, this discussion is months old, so I should probably close comments on it now. There is a new invigorated discussion about whether or not it is reasonably for Mark & I to use WordPress for a blog that supports a Drupal project over at the projectverity.com website if you want to continue this.

As we’ve said many times in the months since this video was first recorded (and no, it was not artificial, that was my first experience of installing Drupal – having used Drupal a lot since then, yes I feel pretty silly looking back at it, but that is kind of the point, isn’t it – those of us who have used Drupal a lot think of newbies questions/problems as being silly, which is not a good position to be taking), sorry, as we’ve said many times, we chose WordPress for this task because for what we needed it to do, it seemed like the right tool. You don’t need a sledgehammer for most nails, do you?

I’m not going to get into answering all your other questions and challenges to our ‘right’ to have opinions – go catch up on the D7UX project, which has now morphed into the Seven theme on Drupal.org and let the work speak for itself.